So, I've been trying a few things recently.

I tried to put gentoo 2004 on my spare partition. I screwed up.

This in turn, seems to have screwed my lilo and I can't boot mandrake 9.1 - I can only get to it from my boot floppy.

Tried a couple of idea's but no success (and no I can't do the re-install of lilo from the dvd).

So, I thought I'd be a smart arse and just download the iso's for 10 community - great, got all three, md5sum's check out ok - Damn, damn.

It seems that cdrecord can't see my burner (I must have bollocksed that up when I was trying to sort out k3b). Again, I thought I'd be a smart arse and boot into knoppix and burn the disc's that way, but after doing the burn I've just got 3 coasters - for reason's that I don't understand I've ended up with a buffer underrun (which has never happened before when using cdrecord).

So, can anyone think of a way to be able to burn the disc's or, move/copy them to my windows partition (which happens to be XP formatted as ntfs) or will I have to re-download them so I can burn them in windows with nero ?????

regards

John

p.s. I'll start the download with windows anyhow, but I'd rather prefer to learn how to sort out my problems with linux (because although I'm intending to install 10 community, I wonder if I should just say f**k it and get/burn it in windows??)

could you not shorten a partition and create a fat partition and mount it as lets say /iso

then as root type :

chown -R username:username /iso

replace username with ur actual username

then go into windows and burn the iso's?

by the way chown = change owndership

this has worked for me before but not with iso's i had to copy all my mp3's off of linux so windows could see them too.

thats the best i can help you with

when you booted into mandrake with the boot disk did you try to burn using k3b or just the command line?

if you type 'cdrecord --scanbus' do you see your cd burner? if you do you try:

'cdrecord -dev=x,x,x -data whatever.iso' replacing the x,x,x with the 3 nums returned in the --scanbus.

also, if you /etc/lilo.conf is still good, what happens if you just type 'lilo' to reinstall boot loader?

Thanks for the advice chaps.

I haven't checked yet, but I think it might be sorted, as I downloaded mandy 10 community and have installed that - so, touch wood, it should work now.

regards

John